Lights,
camera, action: Film studies rolling at Stanford

Before
founding a university, Leland Stanford played a key
role in what is considered one of the most important
moments in the history of motion-picture development.
Now, more than a century later, a film studies minor
program has just finished its inaugural year at
Stanford.

Over the
past few decades, discourse on film has made its way
from coffee houses to college lecture halls.
According to Professor Henry Breitrose, who
established the university's graduate documentary
film and television program in the Communication
Department, academic interest in the study of motion
pictures gained momentum during the early 1970s.

"There
had been a certain reticence to the idea of seriously
studying something that was both an art and an
industry," Breitrose said. "But it became
obvious that a lot of people who thought of high art
as, say, the paintings of Michelangelo were really
admiring an art form that was also a business:
Michelangelo was paid to paint the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel, just as Bach wrote church music to
earn a living. There's nothing about art that makes
it necessarily incompatible with being part of an
industry, and the study of the interaction between
art and commerce is an important aspect of the
field."

But
Stanford has been something of a Johnny-come-lately
to the area of film studies, a fact that Breitrose,
who drafted the proposal for the program in
consultation with colleagues, attributes to "a
certain amount of conservatism with regard to the
popular arts" on the part of the university.

"But
that has changed, mainly for generational
reasons," he added. The university's peer
institutions, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and
the University of Chicago, only recently have started
formal film programs.

Now,
administrators in Stanford's School of Humanities and
Sciences are considering a proposal for a film
studies major. Meanwhile, film is attracting more and
more attention from scholars here in various
humanistic fields.

"Some
of the most important art and probably the most
influential body of art of the 20th century resides
in English-language film," said Rob Polhemus,
chair of the English Department. "The relation
of film and narrative and the relationship of
imaginative language and visual art are vital,
blossoming fields of investigation in the broad
discipline of English."

The
film scholar

With
dark, cropped hair and designer glasses, Scott
Bukatman could have been whisked away from a group of
art-minded New Yorkers and deposited, blinking, in
the California sun. The 44-year-old film scholar
bears a vague semblance to the playwright and
screenwriter David Mamet.

Bukatman
earned his doctorate in cinema studies in 1992 from
the celebrated program at New York University. In
1997, Stanford hired him with the charge of helping
to develop film studies, collaborating with a
committee that included Breitrose and Michael
Marrinan, associate professor of art and art history.
"The idea was that film study would be connected
to the study of visual arts in general," said
Bukatman, sitting in his Cummings Art Building
office, which is festooned with pop-culture
bric-a-brac and movie posters.

Bukatman,
the program's coordinator, is an assistant professor
in the Art and Art History Department, where the
program is housed.

"I
see it pretty comfortably ensconced in the liberal
arts here because it rewards the kind of study the
liberal arts centers upon," he said. "It
rewards textual analysis; it rewards the study of the
artist; it rewards the study of film as a cultural
document; and it rewards the study of film as a
contested cultural document, created by multiple
voices with different agendas and seen by different
audiences with different agendas."

In this
digital era, however, film is not the only medium
that merits study, Bukatman said, citing
computer-generated new media that also produce moving
images, like video games. Nevertheless, many of these
techniques and effects derive from filmmaking, he
said.

"The
study of film works very well on an undergraduate
level because it synthesizes so much from other arts
and other forms of expression -- including literature
and narrative," Bukatman said. "It has a
performative basis, like in theater and performance
art. It is also a real-time experience. In many ways,
it touches upon and synthesizes these various
media."

A
unique fine art

Legend
has it that in 1895, audience members sitting in the
basement of the Grand Café on the Boulevard des
Capucines in Paris yelped and ducked for cover upon
seeing the projection of a locomotive steaming toward
them on a silver screen. What they were watching was
the Lumière brothers' one-shot film of a train
pulling into the station at Ciotat, a small seaside
town about 20 miles to the east of Marseilles.

Yet this
50-second film, widely believed to be the oldest
common ancestor of what is now modern commercial
cinema, seems to embody an element that continues to
make motion pictures unique among its counterparts in
the fine arts: movement.

In film,
not only are the images kinetic, but the mechanism
for projecting them is, too: A roll of flexible film
unspools in front of a bright light at 24 frames per
second. For Bukatman, movement continues to be one of
the most significant and defining aspects of film.

"The
movement of objects within the frame, the
augmentation of that movement through camera movement
or through computer-generated movements -- or
metamorphosis -- it just seems that movement and
change make film very emblematic of the century that
it's been part of," Bukatman said. "It
really began at a time when modernism held great sway
over the intellectual field of Europe and, in some
ways, it's seen as emblematic of modernism: It's
technological; it moves; it captures the fragmented
pace -- the mechanical pace -- of life in this part
of the century. And now that we've entered into a
period of digital culture, we find that films that
use digital effects are really using them to generate
movement or exaggerate a sense of movement -- a sense
of bodily experience at a time when people aren't
quite certain where the body fits into culture
anymore."